High Luminance adjustment

Corsairbuff wrote on 12/15/2005, 6:16 PM
A little background, We shot a video back in May that I am putting the final touches on to release on DVD. I have noticed that parts of the video are too hot (appear washed out on tests with several TV's although they look pretty good on my NTSC monitor. I have tried everything I can think of too lower just the brightness levels slightly. I spoke with a friend today that uses Final Cut Pro (I know a bad word here). But she was showing me that when using the color wheels they have a luminance adjustment for the brights, midtones and lows. We were able to get a relatively good picture doing it way. How do I go about doing that in Vegas 5?

What I have done so far.
I have tried to use the secondary color corrector and adjusted the gain and gamma but it turned an ugly gray. I've used the color corrector and adjusted the gain down, yet when it gets where I want it to be it starts turning the colors funky. Not really the effect I'm looking for. I've looked at the color curves as an option but am having trouble getting the picture to look the way it was in FCP. I've looked through the forum here and the results are not what I need to fix my problem.

Thank-you in advance for any help that will get this project finished.

Comments

GlennChan wrote on 12/15/2005, 8:23 PM
In FCP, those sliders affect luma and not luminance. If you adjust the rightmost slider a lot, notice that the colors will look under or oversaturated.

Vegas is a little different than FCP.
A quick caveat: I assume you are monitoring via an external monitor, not looking at your computer monitor.

Vegas also has luma controls like FCP, except they're a little more infuriating. In Vegas, use either color corrector and adjust the offset, gamma, and gain controls. They kind of correspond to the low, mid, high controls in FCP (those probably aren't the right terms). In Vegas, you may need to juggle through all three of those controls to keep proper levels. You can maintain saturation by keeping the "saturation" control (actually affects chroma) equal to gain.
So if gain = 0.654, then type 0.654 into "saturation".

A simpler filter to use is the levels filter. You can adjust the output end slider to bring the levels down. I would aim for 235 as the highest point on the histogram, under the video scopes.
The following settings are a good starting point:
Levels filter
Output start = 0.008
Output end = 0.925
This will bring the highest level your camera can record to within legal range.

For somewhat relevant information see here (article I wrote on it).

You probably want to aim for proper digital white level, which is 235 on the Vegas histogram. A little under is ok. Equipment isn't supposed to handle levels above proper white level... some DVD players simply clip values above proper white level.
Your consumer TVs may be designed to make the picture really bright, and may be driving the picture too much. Maybe that's why things appear hot on them?
Patryk Rebisz wrote on 12/15/2005, 10:00 PM
side note: i like FCP as an editing program but god do i hate their mostly number based color correction tools...
Corsairbuff wrote on 12/16/2005, 4:48 AM
Thank-you for the replys. I do have a small ext. Panasonic BT-S901Y monitor, it has saved me many times. I have looked at Sony Levels and I think that will work. Glenn I had read your article and for some reason in my tired state last night over looked the setting of the levels as a way to decrease the high luma. I did use it to check the monitor levels and found my monitor was very close to being set up properly. I have book marked the article for future reference.

I used FCP3 in the past as a student. I agree I don't like the color correction tools as a whole, yet the luma control seemed the easiest way to fix my problem from what I was looking at. Using Sony Levels will save me the time of setting each piece of video thus many hours of work. Again Thank. I hope you have a great day.